Top 6 Benefits To Raise Chickens In Your Backyard

Admit it, chickens are cute. These cute little birds are full of charm and personality and can be pretty darn smart as well. Building a chicken coop in your backyard is easy, and whether you’re raising chickens for eggs or meat, you’ll find that your new pets will be an endless source of entertainment. Just like people, chickens will develop their own friends, habits and personal quirks. They come in a wide range of different breeds, turning your backyard into an exotic mosaic of brilliant colours.

Let’s talk about Top 6 Benefits of Backyard Chickens.

BENEFIT #1: LIVING A SUSTAINABLE LIFESTYLE.

Like tending your own vegetable garden, having a few chickens reduces your carbon footprint and shows good environmental stewardship. You’ll also be able to exercise greater control over what you’re feeding to your family. You can raise your chickens organically, using cruelty-free methods and feed that’s free of genetically modified (GMO) ingredients. There’s no better way to know exactly what you’re eating than to grow your own food.

BENEFIT #2: FREE FERTILIZER.

They’ll eat just about any type of table scrap and convert your left-overs into nutrient-rich compost. Dried chicken manure that’s been allowed to turn to compost is high in nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus and calcium, and will help your vegetables and other garden plants flourish. Just work the chicken manure into your soil at the beginning or end of the growing season to reap the benefits of a no-cost organic fertilizer.

BENEFIT #3: NATURAL PEST CONTROL!

If you’ve got a problem with crawling insects, raising chickens in your backyard will soon clear it up. Chickens are omnivores and will snap up all kinds of bugs, beetles, spiders and other pests. Free range chickens are the natural, pesticide-free way to get rid of all those annoying creepy-crawlies, and they’ll also do a great job of keeping the slugs out of your vegetable garden.

BENEFIT #4: GOOD QUALITY, FRESH EGGS … EVERY DAY.

Once you’ve had really fresh eggs, you’ll realize how good and different they are from store-bought eggs. Store-bought eggs have a shelf-life that spans several weeks, while your will only be a day old. Once they mature, almost all chickens will produce an egg a day, and many are double-layers.

BENEFIT #5: MORE NUTRITIOUS.

Did you know that backyard eggs have:

30-50% less cholesterol than factory farmed eggs

75% more beta carotene

25% more Vitamin E

More than double the amount of Omega-3 fats

BENEFIT #6: CRUELTY FREE.

Not only will you get nutritious, fresh eggs, but you can feel good that your omelet is served up cruelty free. Massive chicken farms don’t let their captives run free and most commercially raised chickens never see the light of day. Your kids can learn about humane animal-rearing and alternatives to mass-production. Raising chickens in your backyard is also a hands-on way to teach them the same values they’d learn from caring for any other type of pet. It is also remarkably peaceful to sit and watch chickens scratching around the yard. Listening to their clucking murmurs, seeing how they scratch the ground for grubs, and hearing them vocalize when they lay an egg, is strangely hypnotic and soothing.

If you’ve got a little room and the desire to produce more of your own food, raising chickens is a great place to start. Sometimes you don’t need a lot of reasons to do something.

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